He couldn’t get his mouth to work – March

Let’s called her Allison. She was a revolutionary working class poet. She always wore overhauls. She never wore makeup. Her poems were rough, aggressive, often overwritten. At readings she would often scream out her poems. She was no lilly. And we all assumed that she was lesbian. She later married and had a child. We (I was only a peripheral member of the group) were assembling poetry for an anthology. Michael was sent over to Allison’s house to pick up some poems from her. She met him at her front door dressed in a bikini. (Not many women wore bikinis or even two piece bathing suits in those days.) Allison had a very attractive figure. Michael thought that he might get lucky. (All memories of Allison’s homosexual tendency had completely disappeared from Michael’s mind when he saw that bikini.) Michael sat down at a chair by a coffee table in Allison’s living room while Allison exited to get her poems. When she returned she sat opposite Michael, put down several sheets of paper on the table. And a loaded gun. As Michael told me later, he tried to smile, to laugh it off, but he couldn’t get his mouth to work.